Just found out that last summer, my daughter borrowed utensils from the pastry chef she was assisting. That pastry chef is no longer at the restaurant so my daughter will be assisting someone else. What are some good things (chef tools) to buy the budding pastry chef?

Mike Filigenzi wrote:Well, one thing that's been very handy for us is a "cake lifter" (that's proved useful for much more than lifting cakes). It's about 8" x 8", plus an angled back edge. It's the item pictured here.

A couple more ideas. I would think a pastry bag would be pretty much mandatory equipment and while that's not much of a gift on its own, maybe in a kit with a comprehensive set of tips? Also, I don't know if icing (as in cakes) would come into play but I understand the preferred tool for many is an offset spatula.

Good ideas, Mark. We have a set of offset spatulas of various sizes that get a lot of use. On the pastry bags, we use the disposable ones. I don't know if that's what the pros use or not. Either way, a comprehensive set of tips would make a nice gift.

Something else I just thought of (if a lot of cakes are being made) would be a cake turntable. From what I've seen, they're very helpful when it comes to cake decorating. There's an example of a plastic one sold here.

Jon, you've been given some good ideas. I was thinking about those cutters--they're like a pizza cutter times 6 or 8 or something. Allows very uniform cutting of multiple rows at the same time. You might want to take a look at a website like cheftools.com for those and other products:[url]http://www.cheftools.com/Pastry-Wheel-C ... ducts/741/[/url]

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov